Tag: software engineering

The Landing Pilot is the Non-Handling Pilot until the “decision altitude” call, when the Handling Non-Landing Pilot hands the handling to the Non-Handling Landing Pilot, unless the latter calls “go-around”, in which case the Handling Non-Landing Pilot, continues Handling and the Non-Handling Landing Pilot continues non-handling until the next call of “land” or “go-around”, as Read more about The Landing Pilot is the Non-Handling Pilot[…]

To those who responded to my plea for help by leaving a comment or responding out-of-band, thank you very much. We’ve settled on a name for our application, purchased the corresponding domain names and filed a trade mark application. Will keep you posted as things evolve further. But just to give you an idea, we’ve Read more about Thanks for your help[…]

For anyone who’s using Subversion through Textmate, you might be interest in Ciarán Walsh’s SVNMate plugin. It changes the icons for files and folders in the project drawer depending upon their SVN status. Very handy.

There are so many sites offering suggestions on how to get the mysql rubygem working on Mac OS X Leopard. None of them worked for me. Here’s how I got the gem installed. After attempting to install the gem normally, with sudo gem install mysql (which bombs out), go into /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7 or wherever it tried Read more about Installing the mysql rubygem on Leopard[…]

It’s probably time to come clean about my recent spate of posts on startups, Ruby, Python and so on. Well, there are a few things about peer review and publishing in the realm of academia that I think could be better, so I tried to figure out an alternative process that retains the benefits and Read more about Startup: an explanation[…]

In the bits of spare time I get here and there, I’ve been continuing my hypothetical hunt for a language and web framework in which to implement my hypothetical "web 2.0" idea. It occurs to me that if all these little bits of spare time were clumped together so that I could, hypothetically, do some Read more about Ricky, Ruby and Rails (hypothetically speaking)[…]

When you’ve spent years coding pretty much everything in Java, it’s hard to break out of the Java way of doing things. It means that you tend to forget that other languages might have things called closures, for example. Here’s how a closure looks in Python: lambda x:dosomethingto(x,anothervariable) The neat thing is that this closure Read more about Rediscovering closures and nested functions[…]

Forget my previous entry about mod_python. Just use mod_wsgi. It compiles without issues on the Mac (unlike mod_python, which is why I made a binary available for it), and seems to be the future for Apache/Python integration. See Graham’s comment on my last entry.

In case anyone’s interested, I’m making available a pre-built universal binary of mod_python 3.3.1 for Apache 2.2.8. I’m running Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.2 and Python 2.5.1. The DMG contains an installer package, and it will try to install mod_python to /usr/libexec/apache2, which is where the other apache modules are usually located. Use at your Read more about Mod_python for the Mac[…]